Inside Mister Green, The A.P.C. of Head Shops

Sleek ceramic bongs, beautifully designed rolling trays, and a fragrance called Hippie Shit are here to make your smoking game stronger and more stylish.

Ariel Stark-Benz is the founder of Mister Green, a Los Angeles-based cannabis company with a minimalist but lighthearted selection of apparel, apothecary goods, and, yes, marijuana paraphernalia. Stark-Benz has avoided the Grateful Dead dancing bears and itchy hemp ponchos, instead imagining a weed wonderland that’s tasteful and warm. He's embraced the kind of earthy and pared-down aesthetic principles that have come to define our time: understated ceramics in naturalistic colors, casual skate wear-inspired sweatshirts with subtle and playful stoner insignias, and castile soap with hints of “spiritually purifying” Palo Santo. Think of it as the first post-normcore pot brand, or even as weed's answer to your local A.P.C. store. Stark-Benz doesn't believe in abandoning or compromising style in pursuit of a decent high.

After operating as a popular e-shop for about two years—even Vogue and Union Los Angeles have co-signed his smoky, woodsy scent, Hippie Shit—Mister Green has opened a brick-and-mortar store in East Hollywood just in time for 4/20. The breezy assortment of tees and hoodies designed by Stark-Benz and his curated collection of smoking tools are arranged on blond wood tables, or hung simply on a rack. Porcelain bongs intermingle with high-end joint rolling trays. Vintage, poly-bagged issues of High Times are for sale along with some cheeky, lower-brow keychains which declare "I'm high, lol." And even though he's just opened, Stark-Benz already has expansion on the mind: he hopes to house a full-fledged dispensary in the near future, too. If this store is any indication, a Mister Green dispensary might just be the coolest thing to happen to marijuana since Marley.

In honor of this latest endeavor, we spoke to Stark-Benz about his bud business, his favorite strain of weed, and why cannabis has a branding problem.

GQ Style: People have an idea of what a head shop looks like, and this is not it.Ariel Stark-Benz: We’re all very familiar with head shops. Not only can you buy a cheap bong, but there are always silly takeaways. Porno playing cards, Jolt cola, lowbrow things of all sorts. The first head shop I went to as a kid, I’d be all over anything I could find with the classic leaf on—a T-shirt, shoe laces, anything. I was looking for a little bit of dicey-ness. But you’d also find a few things a bit over your head, like R. Crumb, which was prevalent in those shops, or DIY hippie stuff, or a book about how to cultivate tofu. Big tapestries, lots of brown, a few black lights and some posters underneath—everything was very ‘basement’ vibe.

For me, I’m much more interested in making something that feels like a gallery. Make things airy and out in the open. I think of it as a select shop, in the Japanese tradition, like Beams or United Arrows. Beams has created or perfected this notion of a lifestyle store that always comes back to good design, and unique products that you can fill your life with. One of the most fundamental pieces of my aesthetic is letting raw or natural materials be really present. Almost the entire build-out of the shop was about finding beautiful pieces of pine with insane woodgrain pattern, and we covered them with a light white wash. Because honestly, they’re crazy looking, almost like tie dye. I like to say that nature is the biggest tripper.

Those head shops had basement vibes, partly, because weed was something we used to have hide, but your space looks so open and full of light.
The laws are changing, there’s very little to hide, and my hope would be that people who are trying to develop this industry are a bit more interested in having a complex conversation about how this next generation could look.

I don’t smoke that much, but I’m very sensitive to space when I’m high—I have vivid memories of being in 711s under fluorescent lights as a teenager and freaking out. How do you design a shop that feels good to be high in?
It’s in the details. People describe my brand as minimal, and I agree, I try to have an uncluttered environment. But as soon as you get into the details, you find some pretty trippy shit. I have definitely designed the space for stoned people. You can wander around, you’re not going to bump into anything, but as soon as you want to zero in, there’s lot of sensory experiences to blow your mind with. Nice aromas. When I’m high, it does become an extremely sensory experience, and I tend to take things quite slow, and I look at things quite hard, and so that idea that you can kind of slowly take anything in—there’s little sections, and you can touch and pick up and read and smell. The wood grain patterns we chose in here, some of them look like leopard—they’re so strange. Even if you want to sit, there are a few places just to sit and take in the whole thing.

Why go to the trouble of smoking out of nice ceramic bowls and bongs when you could just as easily use the cheap stuff you can buy at bodegas?
If you’re interested in nice things, why should partaking in smoking be interrupted in any way? When you go to people’s houses and they have a beautiful leather sling chair, their coffee table is full of the best curated books, but they have a shitty glass bong underneath the table? That’s something to chuckle at, but if you want to normalize something—or, at least, to not create a feeling of cultural cheapness—having the proper paraphernalia is important. With Summerland ceramics, which I stock, it was one of the most important discoveries I made, because I finally found a bong that was truly a beautiful, minimal form. It’s porcelain.

Playful is important too! I want to be serious about design, but there’s a certain beauty about not taking yourself too seriously. I love Gatorbeug. As a term, the name means a bong made out of a Gatorade bottle. I found them because I saw an image of a ceramic bowl made in the shape of a deflated basketball—it’s nostalgic and compelling and innocent. The first time I ever smoked was out of a Dr. Pepper can, the only way you’d be able to as a pre-teen. To be honest with you, I was 9 years old when I did it. [Laughs] Some really dried-out pot stolen from my friend’s sister. I have a feeling the old DIY can or apple pipe won’t ever go away. Gatorbeug makes me think about that, and it’s fun to explore.

What strain do you smoke now?
My favorite strain is blue cheese, a cross between UK cheese and blue dream. I call it ‘joie de vivre,’ because no matter what I’m doing, it makes me feel really good. I tend to prefer to smoke sativas because it makes you a more active doer and thinker—I’m rarely finding myself wanting to be completely obliterated and wanting to lay down.

You’re also selling a collection of the first 25 issues of High Times from the 1970s—leafing through them, what stuck out to you about cannabis culture of the time?
I think what I loved about them was the general approach to where the counterculture movement was at the time. Cannabis was an accessory to that entire movement, to the ’60s and ’70s, arguably the most important era of our time. There’s so much to it. High Times was modeled after Playboy—even the centerfold of pot was based off the Playboy one. You’ll get articles by people like Hunter S. Thompson. There’s just such a true sense of counterculture thought and activity.

Looking at your brand, though, made me even wonder if cannabis even is counterculture anymore.
It has to be! In Los Angeles, there’s going to be legal aspects to using and buying cannabis, but it’s still federally illegal. It’s recognized by this government as a schedule 1 narcotic, which puts it on par with heroin. It’s such a weird fascinating time. I have friends who are extremely open liberal people but the notion of being associated with pot really rubs them the wrong way. The way we’ve been taught about the plant, it still has to be counterculture.

It almost sounds like you’re saying that, basically, cannabis has a branding problem.
Cannabis has a branding problem. It has been approached from an overly simplistic point of view. Putting a pot leaf on every single product. People are finally moving away from doing that. We’re in this completely new territory where people are creating an absolutely ground-up system for relating this new world to the general public. I can no longer afford to be shy about it. I have to own it. Are people going to look at me and think, That guy looks like a stoner? It’s such a strange thing. We have such ingrained, intense ideas about what a person [who uses cannabis] should be like. It always comes down to stereotypes. There’s so many different types of people who use cannabis out there, and so many different ways to appeal to them.

So do you serve alcohol at an opening like this or are you going to have edibles?
[Laughs] Some friends are supposedly making weed jello shots for us. That should work.